Use NotebookLM to create an engaging podcast

Google’s Notebook LM is only a few weeks old, and rapidly evolving.  As Google describes, “it turns documents, slides, charts and more into engaging discussions with one click.”

The results are surprisingly good.

1. Go to NotebookLM.
2. Click on + to create new notebook.
3. Add at least one source.
4. In your Notebook guide, click on the “Generate” button to create an Audio Overview.
5.  Click the download icon to download the audio file.

 

For this project, we simply turned September Gist, a curated newsletter, to generate this discussion.

Our take

The results from the white paper audio discussion was better than the newsletter, which had too many pieces of information and sounded more disjointed.

Some of the discussion was a little below the level of our typical audience of publishers.

In general, the voices and the experience of a two-person discussion sounded and felt real.

We felt this may be best utilized today for hyper-local news where the content is still niche but does not require a standard of expertise.

Use cases may be in the sponsored content area, ie turn my client’s blog into a discussion that can be posted on their website.

If you like the way the conversational format, it can be better than an editor or AI-generated script.

What we wanted:

• More formats for uploading.  We could not upload an article or email without turning it into a PDF. More steps, that mitigated the one-click beauty of the thing.
• An easy way to edit built-in. In case the tone or word choice is slightly off we didn’t see an easy way to chat with it to change the prompt. Did we miss something here?
• If there is no easy way to edit, then sponsors will not be happy. So other tools with editing and distribution are currently faster, even if reading an AI-generated script. You can dump the conversation into a text-to-speech editing tool, give the customer a limited number of edits, and charge for this time.
• Distribution options.
• More voice options. Tools like Zappy and ElevenLabs voice generator have more options.

Given that this tool is less than one month old at this writing, we recommend experimenting with it, especially in the hyper-local space. For B2B or passion economy niches: Test it today. Test again in a month.

Send me your opinion at alisa@nichepublisher.biz